Web design in Canterbury.

Canterbury has two audiences that most Kent towns do not, and they behave nothing like each other. There are the visitors — a cathedral city and a World Heritage site pulls people who are researching on a phone, in a hurry, with no local knowledge, deciding between you and whatever else is within a ten-minute walk. And there are the students, tens of thousands of them across the University of Kent and Canterbury Christ Church, arriving every September knowing nothing and choosing everything from scratch.

Both of those are search problems before they are design problems. The visitor wants opening hours, a location and a booking button before anything else, and will leave if the page is slow on 4G near the cathedral. The student is searching in September for the same twenty things every year. A site that answers the obvious questions immediately and legibly will beat a prettier one that buries them, which is why we build small, fast and direct rather than large and impressive.

The independent retail and hospitality on the high street and around the lanes is the other half of it. Those businesses are competing with chains that have real marketing budgets, and the one advantage they have is being specific and being genuinely local — so the site should sound like the business rather than like a template, and should be findable on the terms people actually type.